Obama’s Counterterrorism Policy and the Washington Post’s Editorials: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Media-State Interaction

American mass media’s relation with the US government in foreign policy decision-making has been the subject of numerous studies in the interdisciplinary field of political communication. This paper reexamines the interaction between the media and the government in the US foreign policy decision-making process, analyzing the possible congruity and/or incongruity between The Washington Post’s commentaries and former US President Barack Obama’s anti-terrorism campaign. A Critical Discourse Analysis of two Obama statements on counterterrorism, one Washington Post Op-Ed and one editorial suggest that there is an agreement between Obama’s speeches and the corresponding newspaper articles in topics such as choosing defense over offense, changing the conventional war trend, deploying troops, closing down GTMO, avoiding torture and the violation of American citizens privacy, freedom of press, avoiding giving too much importance to terrorists, and increasing air marshals on flights. Hence, this study confirms the theory of Robinson, which argues that the mediastate relation, i.e. the relationship between The Washington Post’s commentaries and President Barack Obama’s statements, is a bidirectional process in which both American elite media and the US government are involved in attempting to influence the other party under certain conditions.

Keywords:

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) , Media-State Interaction , Obama’s Counterterrorism Policy , Robinson’s Media-State Theory , The Washington Post